What Users do with PLOS ONE Papers

Inspired by four recent blog posts and their comments (Comments at journal websites: just turn them off, Open Access and The Dramatic Growth of PLoS ONE, No Comment?, If you email it, they will comment), I created a graphic to show what users do with PLoS ONE papers. As always, the data behind the graphic are openly available. I think that the number of times a paper is informally discussed (comments, Facebook, science blogs, etc.) should be much larger compared to the numer of formal citations. The challenge is of course to have technology that captures all these discussions – this is much more difficult than for bookmarks or citations, and is obviously what altmetrics is all about. The blog posts I link to above also express another feeling: that there are still too many barriers for scientists to take part in the informal discussion of scholarly research on the web, in particular as comments on journal websites. Hat tip to David McCandless for inspiration.

Update 08/02/12: The publication of the dataset used in this chart was delayed, but the data are now available at the link provided.

Sylvain, I wanted to imply inclusion, even though this is of course an oversimplification. But I think that often the process works similar to this this: read short piece of paper (abstract, etc.) -> read fulltext -> save in reference manager -> discuss informally -> cite in a scholarly paper. The number of people at every step of course gets smaller.

Philippe, yes this is indeed a lot of HTML views. You have to add the 12,492,110 HTML views at PubMed Central plus the unknown number of views in institutional repositories. The HTML to PDF ratio of about 4 is surprisingly consistent for most PLOS papers.

Twitter for PLOS articles was started just recently so the numbers are still small. Blog posts about PLOS articles are difficult to find, Research Blogging is one of the best sources (ScienceSeeker is another one).

Why do these data not line up with the underlying dataset? There are 47,029 PLoS ONE articles in the dataset, yielding 278,270 CrossRef citations, as I tally it in the Excel spreadsheet you reference as the source for these data.

There is another small difference: I looked at the July data dump, which should be available shortly. The download link still points to the April data.

One exercise you can do with this dataset is to compare citation counts from CrossRef, Web of Science, Scopus and PubMed Central. A preliminary analysis shows that they are very highly correlated, but I would like to understand where they differ.

About Gobbledygook

Martin Fenner has for many years worked as medical doctor and cancer researcher at the Hannover Medical School Cancer Center in Germany. In May 2012 he started contract work as technical lead for the PLoS Article Level Metrics project. He is writing about how the internet is changing scholarly communication. Martin can be found on Twitter as @mfenner.